Related papers: Characteristics Design: A Hedonic Approach to Opti…
Economic institutions often influence market outcomes not by directly controlling sellers' menus, but by shaping the market composition sellers face. We study the welfare effects of this upstream choice in a monopoly screening model. An…
We show that the mechanism-design problem for a monopolist selling multiple, heterogeneous objects to a buyer with ex ante symmetric and additive values is equivalent to the mechanism-design problem for a monopolist selling identical…
In the context of nonlinear prices, the empirical evidence suggests that the consumers have cognitive biases represented in a limited understanding of nonlinear price structures, and they respond to some alternative perceptions of the…
Understanding the bias-variance tradeoff in user representation learning is essential for improving recommendation quality in modern content platforms. While well studied in static settings, this tradeoff becomes significantly more complex…
Algorithmic recommender systems such as Spotify and Netflix affect not only consumer behavior but also producer incentives. Producers seek to create content that will be shown by the recommendation algorithm, which can impact both the…
We study fair allocation of constrained resources, where a market designer optimizes overall welfare while maintaining group fairness. In many large-scale settings, utilities are not known in advance, but are instead observed after…
We consider a principal seller with $m$ heterogeneous products to sell to an additive buyer over independent items. The principal can offer an arbitrary menu of product bundles, but faces competition from smaller and more agile single-item…
In several socioeconomic-critical decision-making settings, such as fair resource allocation, climate policy, or AI alignment, multiple principals interact within a common arena. While it is well established that these principals may have…
This paper studies ranking policies in a stylized trial-offer marketplace model, in which a single firm offers products and has consumers with heterogeneous preferences. Consumer trials are influenced by past purchases and the ranking of…
We study how market segmentation affects consumers when a monopolist can adjust both prices and product qualities across segments, engaging in second- and third-degree price discrimination simultaneously. We characterize the…
We study the competitive and welfare effects of copyright in creative industries in the face of cost-reducing technologies such as generative artificial intelligence. Creative products often feature unstructured attributes (e.g., images and…
We study a model of competitive information design in an oligopoly search market with heterogeneous consumer search costs. A unique class of equilibria -- upper-censorship equilibria -- emerges under intense competition. In equilibrium,…
This paper characterizes optimal classification when individuals adjust their behavior in response to the classification rule. We model the interaction between a designer and a population as a Stackelberg game: the designer selects a…
This paper proposes a method for estimating consumer preferences among discrete choices, where the consumer chooses at most one product in a category, but selects from multiple categories in parallel. The consumer's utility is additive in…
Online platforms, such as Airbnb, hotels.com, Amazon, Uber and Lyft, can control and optimize many aspects of product search to improve the efficiency of marketplaces. Here we focus on a common model, called the discriminatory control…
We study the interplay of fairness, welfare, and equity considerations in personalized pricing based on customer features. Sellers are increasingly able to conduct price personalization based on predictive modeling of demand conditional on…
We analyze demand settings where heterogeneous consumers maximize utility for product attributes subject to a nonlinear budget constraint. We develop nonparametric methods for welfare-analysis of interventions that change the constraint.…
Consumers in many markets are uncertain about firms' qualities and costs, so buy based on both the price and the quality inferred from it. Optimal pricing depends on consumer heterogeneity only when firms with higher quality have higher…
Alignment with human preferences is commonly framed using a universal reward function, even though human preferences are inherently heterogeneous. We formalize this heterogeneity by introducing user types and examine the limits of the…
Dworczak et al. (2021) study when certain market structures are optimal in the presence of heterogeneous preferences. A key assumption is that the social planner knows the joint distribution of the value of the good and marginal value of…